Obama Nominates John Brennan, 'Kill List' Architect, as New CIA Chief

John Brennan's career spans from the dark days of Bush's torture program to Obama's secretive 'kill list'

Obama Nominates John Brennan, 'Kill List' Architect, as New CIA Chief
Jon Queally, staff writer
Published on Monday, January 7, 2013 by Common Dreams

At a White House ceremony on Monday afternoon, President Obama officially nominated his top counterterrorism advisor John Brennan to be the next director of the CIA.

In his assessment of the decision, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald argues that it should not be shocking that Brennan—who was withdrawn from consideration for CIA chief in 2008 because of his association with the CIA's torture program under President Bush—has now been brought back by President Obama in 2013.

Greenwald called Obama's nomination of Brennan a "symptom of Obama's own extremism (in the controversial areas of torture, targeted killings, and the US drone policy), not a cause."

Calling it a fitting choice, Greenwald said the decision

is a perfect illustration of the Obama legacy that a person who was untouchable as CIA chief in 2008 because of his support for Bush's most radical policies is not only Obama's choice for the same position now, but will encounter very little resistance. Within this change one finds one of the most significant aspects of the Obama presidency: his conversion of what were once highly contentious right-wing policies into harmonious dogma of the DC bipartisan consensus.

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11. I'd ignore that nasty baggage from across the pond.

Here's a better metric: the harder Greenwald and Hedges fulminate in someone's direction, the better they must be. Here's AEI spokesperson Danielle Pletka, drum-banger extrarodinaire for the Iraq war during the terra era, complaining this morning on NPR that Brennan is a Hezbollah-lcoddling jihadist:

On Monday, President Obama announced he would nominate Chuck Hagel to be Defense secretary and John Brennan for CIA director. Steve Inskeep talks to Danielle Pletka, vice president of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute, and Vali Nasr, a scholar of the Muslim world and a former adviser to the Obama administration, about these nominations.